I keep hearing a lot of murmuring in the small business marketing community, talking about Google Adwords/PPC, and other forms of paid advertisement. The general consensus is that these are effective marketing techniques for small businesses, but in actuality, organic search results are where small businesses should be focusing your marketing efforts.
We’re already not the biggest fans of Google Adwords because of their deceptive advertisements and how they suck money from the bootstrapped small business, only to provide them with “impressions” and “clicks”, not “customers”.
After reading this post on SearchEngineLand.com, it’s even more apparent to me that small business marketers should be creating pages and optimize them with the long-tail keywords that relate specifically to your products/services. After all, long-tail keywords are the best option for small business marketers looking to get on page 1.
You can find out which keywords are best for your small business website optimization efforts by signing up for your free BoostSuite account now!
Organic Rankings and The Top Positions Within Them
Looking back at the SearchEngineLand.com article, Jessica points out that not only is it important to appear on page one of the search results, but it’s also important to rank within the top 5.
Compete.com released a study last year which showed 53% of organic search clicks go to the first result, and 87% of the total clicks on the first page is within the top 5 results.
You’ll also notice only 15% of the total listings on page 1 of the search results are paid. That’s not a lot of real estates and if it’s an extremely competitive keyword, the likelihood you’re going to show up in one of those sponsored ad areas is pretty low if you’re a small business.
You have to do EVERYTHING right. Your landing pages must be optimized for the keyword to get your Quality Score up and your CPC price down, otherwise, you will have to outbid your competitors who probably have deeper pockets than you.
To Get More Results, Go Organic
The data has spoken. You have a much better chance of getting click-throughs directly from the organic search results. Searchers prefer clicking on them as opposed to paid ads.
Organic results are more trustworthy and even better, they’re FREE. This means small businesses should be using a tool like BoostSuite to find the keywords which are best for your business, optimize your pages with said keywords to build out your site’s content to build inbound links to rank higher, and convert more of your visitors into leads and customers.
Do you agree or disagree with my outlook regarding small businesses focusing on organic search results as opposed to paid? Let’s hear your opinion in the comments below!
